Earlyface

These tips are designed to help you save time while you’re studying, whether you’re beginning a full day before the exam or even the night before. With some hard work and perseverance, you’ll be able to confidently identify and memorize key concepts in the course, even if you’ve fallen behind in class.

1. Make a List of Important Concepts
The first thing you need to realize is that you can’t possibly study everything in the course in one day. That’s simply impossible and would require way more time than you have.

Think of your study session as a type of “triage,” where you only concentrate on the most important concepts, terms, and ideas in the course. The logic behind this strategy is that if a concept is very central to the course, then you will gain peripheral knowledge of other less important topics by focusing on it.

In general, you know something is important if:

The instructor has explicitly said it will be on the exam.
It has come up a lot in the textbook and/or lectures.
It is fundamental to understanding other topics in the course.
It is highlighted, underlined, or bolded in a course syllabus or textbook.
To begin looking for these terms, grab your course syllabus, a pen, and a blank notebook. Start making your way through the syllabus, jotting down any important terms in the blank notebook as you go. Another idea is to make flash cards for each key term.

Whatever method you choose, make sure you have a complete inventory of these key concepts for review. Keep this list handy so you can add more terms as you work. The idea is to make a kind of “cheat list” for you to review at the end of the studying session.

2. Look for Summaries in the Textbook
If your textbook is well-designed, it should have summaries of each section at either the beginning or the end of each chapter.

Find these summaries and study them—hard. Some professors will also provide summaries of important themes as handouts for the class.

Anything that’s labeled Introduction, Conclusion, or Summary is what you want to focus on here, since these sections will synthesize information for you, making it easier to remember.
 
3. Make More Notes as You Go
Research shows that you learn much better if you write information down. As you study, jot down anything you want to commit to memory.

Unlike your list of key terms, this type of note-taking doesn’t have to be neat. Just grab some scraps of paper and write down what you need to remember.

Make sure you’re writing and not typing, since typing isn’t as effective for memorizing facts.

4. Make Use of Mind Maps, Charts, and Graphs
This isn’t something you want to spend a lot of time doing if you’re pressed for time, but taking fifteen minutes to make a quick mind map is a great way to synthesize the information you’ve learned.

One of the tricks to studying effectively is seeing the connections between various topics in the course.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming the material in Week One has no relevance to Week Seven. In fact, it’s more than likely that Week Seven directly builds on concepts learned near the beginning of the course.

Try using a visual aid, like a chart, graph or mind map, to explicitly identify the connections between the course material. It’ll give you a much better understanding of the concepts as a whole.

5. Teach a Friend
Another effective way of memorizing information is to pretend you’re teaching it to someone else.

Once you feel reasonably comfortable with the material, meet up with a friend for an hour and present them with what you know. Encourage them to ask questions about the material so you’ll be forced to re-explain concepts or think more critically about the subject.

It sounds hard, but teaching someone who knows less about a topic than you do is a great way to cement what you already know.

6. Review Your Important Terms List
Remember the list of terms you made at the beginning of the study session? It’s now time to review it and make sure you understand everything on the list.

For each term, try saying a complete definition out loud. If you can’t remember a term, put an asterisk next to it and move on to the next one.

By the end of this exercise, you should feel pretty confident about many of the terms, and not so confident about the ones with asterisks. Take 30 minutes or so to refresh your memory on the trickier terms, then quiz yourself again